Luigi Longo

Luigi Longo (15 March 1900-16 October 1980) was General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party from 22 August 1964 to 16 March 1972, succeeding Palmiro Togliatti and preceding Enrico Berlinguer. He was also an Italian Resistance leader during World War II.

Biography
Luigi Longo was born in Fubine, Piedmont, Italy on 15 March 1900, and he became involved with the youth wing of the Italian Socialist Party while attending the Polytechnic University of Turin. He became a Marxist political propagandist, and he was one of the instigators of the split of the Bolshevik Italian Communist Party from the PSI. When Benito Mussolini's fascist party seized power in 1922, he fled to France and became a leader of the PCI in exile. In 1933, he became a member of the Comintern's political commission, and he formed a joint action agreement with the PSI in 1934.

During the Spanish Civil War, Longo served as an inspector of the International Brigades under Randolfo Pacciardi, and he returned to France after Francisco Franco seized power. From 1939 to 1941, he was imprisoned at the Vernet internment camp for his role in fighting in the civil war, and he was handed over to Fascist Italy in 1941. He was interned at Ventotene until 1943, when the overthrow of Mussolini led to hhis release. Longo led the "Garibaldi Brigades" of the Italian Resistance during the Italian Civil War theatre of World War II, and his partisans would be those who executed Mussolini at Dongo on Lake Como in April 1945.

After the war's end, Longo was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, and he served as Chairman of the Italian Communist Party from 1964 to 1972. He played down an alliance between the PCI and the Soviet Union in favor of supporting the "Italian road to Socialism", and he was disposed to support the New Left activists during the 1960s, while not condoning their excesses. In 1972, the sickly Longo resigned as chairman, and he died in 1980.